At the MCA, a taste worth trusting

If you were to stick Peter Taub in a lineup of ordinary Chicagoans and ask someone to guess which person worked at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taub would not stand a chance of avoiding detection.

There is a touch of the Dieter (of "Saturday Night Live" Sprockets fame), about Taub. He has the cool attire, the clipped speech, the trendy glasses, the measured tones, the serious demeanor, the whole arty, intellectualized nine yards.

But Taub, who runs the MCA's performance series, is a complicated fellow. He is indeed comfortable discussing deconstruction, postmodernism, interdisciplinary art and the like, but he's hardly an elitist. "I really like work that embraces popular culture as well as those deep intellectual issues," Taub told me the other day. "I look for work rooted in some kind of real-world, populist sensibility."

I'd called Taub out of the blue for a couple of reasons. If you read various East Coast publications, you'll know that the Elevator Repair Service production of "Gatz" just played at the Public Theatre in New York. As is the habit of these frequently irritating publications, the show was treated as if it had just emerged from the wilderness for the first time. Here in Chicago, we saw this astonishing adaptation of "The Great Gatsby" — one of the most compelling experiences of my theatergoing life — two years ago. And the ticket prices here were about one-third the cost of what they're currently asking in New York.

We have Taub to thank for that. In fact, Taub and the MCA even contributed financially to the initial development of the piece.

Then there was last weekend. I dragged myself Saturday night to a performance of a show called "Empire (Art & Politics)," by the European group Superamas. Like a lot of the presentations at the MCA, it came and went in a couple of days. There was hardly time to write about it. But it was, to say the least, fascinating.

It was Taub who brought these 18 performers to Chicago — just Chicago, since the other U.S. gigs fell through. This was not, clearly, a profit-making enterprise. But it was a cultural service to the city of Chicago. It dawned on me that Taub is a curator who really can be trusted.

You might not like all the shows Taub brings to Chicago — and, by the way, he draws from music, theater, dance and the various intersections thereof — but he never wastes your time. I think that's because he keeps it real. "I don't look for linear narratives," he said, "because I think that the episodic, fractured narrative really is closer to our multitasking world. I can walk out on Michigan Avenue, and three out of five people are on their cell phones. I try to have work on our stage that is similarly multifaceted."

There aren't many museums in the U.S. with extensive performance series — the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco are Taub's main peers, along with the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

But Taub has an annual budget of only about $750,000 to work with; BAM spends closer to $20 million. That probably explains why the MCA series is not as well known as it should be.

It's true that other Chicago groups present international work — most notably Chicago Shakespeare Theater, the Goodman Theatre and the Dance Center of Columbia College. But with Performing Arts Chicago long gone and our local universities not doing anywhere near as much arts presenting as, say, the Krannert Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the MCA performance series is a crucial part of the Chicago cultural landscape. Better yet, the MCA has a terrific, unpretentious venue, with neutral decor, a large stage, a sophisticated atmosphere and a visual and acoustic setup that focuses the mind on the work at hand. And it brings people to the very heart of the growing theater district on the shoparama known as the Magnificent Mile.

I hope the museum and its supporters will send more resources Taub's way. The MCA Stage could, should be our equivalent of BAM. But it needs to be busier, so people get in the habit of going there. Taub says he wants to do more to introduce his shows to their local counterparts, and get the MCA more involved in the development of new work.

Even if you don't know much about, say, the Big Dance Theater (coming in November) or the dance-theater company Betontanc and the Latvian puppet theater troupe Umka LV (appearing together in January), I predict with growing confidence that neither show will be a disappointment.

After all, Taub has picked 'em.

cjones5@tribune.com

Do you agree with Chris Jones?

"The Lion King" is better than Mary Zimmerman's "Candide," he says. Catch him at "Critic's Eye: How the Tribune's Critics See the Chicago Arts Scene," a discussion moderated by the Tribune's Julia Keller, also with Greg Kot, Michael Phillips, Howard Reich and John von Rhein. The program is at 6 p.m. Monday at the Broadway Playhouse, 175 E. Chestnut St. A reception follows, where you can meet and debate with the critics. Tickets are $25, $15 for members of Trib Nation (enter the code TRIBNAT15 at checkout). For more information, call 312-222-3348 or go to chicagotribune.com/TribNation